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Vol 462 | Issue no. 7271 | 19 November 2009
The entangled bank unravels
This third special issue in Nature’s year-long celebration of Charles Darwin focuses on the dire challenges
to Earth’s biodiversity — and finds some reason for hope.
t is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with some cause for optimism. For example, the United Nations General
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, Assembly has named 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling with a meeting scheduled in New York next September at which heads
through the damp earth.” So Charles Darwin begins the concluding of state will take up the issue. The following month, parties to the
paragraph of On the Origin of Species, published 150 years ago next biodiversity convention will gather in Nagoya, Japan, to develop speweek. By invoking this gentle image, Darwin sought to emphasize cific and verifiable biodiversity targets for nations over the coming
how “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” have all decades. These meetings give countries an incentive to start protecting
evolved through the process of natural selection.
vital ecosystems during the next 11 months so that they can head to
Were he alive today, Darwin would have cause to be less rhapsodic. the Nagoya summit boasting of success.
The modern version of his bank might
There is growing recognition that
well be dominated by invasive shrubs,
diverse ecosystems can provide subEDITORIAL
stantial economic benefits — a concept
having been denuded of most native
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The entangled bank
known as ecosystem services — which
plants by deforestation, and nearby
unravels
streams would probably be polluted and
has strengthened support for conservaBiodiversity
filled with sediment from excess run-off.
tion in the business and political comNEWS
It is hardly news that the rich pageant
munities. The News Feature on page 270
263
Efforts to sustain biodiversity
of life, which inspired Darwin and his
profiles ecologist Gretchen Daily of
fall short
work, is now suffering. According to
Stanford University in Palo Alto, CaliNatasha Gilbert
fornia, an advocate of this concept who
data released this month by the InterNEWS FEATURES
helped it to emerge as a major idea in
national Union for Conservation of
Nature in its Red List of Threatened Speconservation. Another article (page
266
Biodiversity’s bright spot
cies, one-fifth of mammals and nearly
266) shows this concept in action in
Gene Russo
one-third of amphibians are threatened
Brazil, where it has helped to preserve
270
Putting a price on nature
with extinction, and the situation is no
the remaining patches of the speciesEmma Marris
rich Atlantic forest. And in an Opinion
better among plants: almost one-third
of known gymnosperms, the group that
piece (page 277), the leader of an inter272
On the origin of bar codes
includes conifers, are threatened. Yet
national study, known as the Economics
Nick Lane
of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
despite all the warnings from scientists
OPINION
project, argues that governments must
and environmentalists, nations have
277
Costing the Earth
done little more than fret over the probput taxes and benefits in place to protect
Pavan Sukhdev
lem. Although almost 200 countries have
nature’s ‘public goods’. Just last week, the
pledged through the Convention on BioTEEB project announced initial results
278
A force to fight global warming
logical Diversity to significantly reduce
suggesting that investments in conservaWill R. Turner, Michael Oppenheimer
the rate of biodiversity loss by next year,
tion can reap economic benefits that far
& David S. Wilcove
leaders of that effort acknowledge not
exceed the initial outlay.
280
Let the locals lead
only that the world will come up short of
The situation in Brazil is a good examRobert J. Smith
this target, but also that it was basically
ple. Preserving patches of forest has not
only helped the golden lion tamarin to
unachievable from the start and that it
282
A call to the custodians of deep time
represented more of a political statement
survive, but has also helped to provide
Douglas Erwin
(see page 263).
clean water, flood control and other ecoBOOKS & ARTS
This week, Nature ends its year-long
nomic benefits to nearby communities.
287
Log of life beneath the waves
These ‘win–win’ situations are natural
celebration of Darwin (www.nature.
Mark Schrope
com/darwin) by examining some of the
starting points for conservation efforts
most pressing issues concerning the loss
because they are easily sold to politicians
of biodiversity, as well as ways to address
and other stakeholders.
For podcast and more online
the problem. The fact that upper levels of
Climate change will place new stresses
extras see www.nature.com/darwin
government are beginning to focus their
on already weakened ecosystems but it
attention on the biodiversity crisis gives
can also present political and economic
“I
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
251
EDITORIALS
NATURE|Vol 462|19 November 2009
opportunities. One example is a strategy known as reducing emissions
from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the clearing of forests accounts for approximately one-fifth of greenhouse-gas
emissions by humans. Thus, stopping deforestation could be a relatively
cheap and effective way to reduce emissions and slow the rate of global
warming. At the same time, argue Will Turner and his colleagues in an
Opinion piece on page 278, efforts to preserve natural ecosystems can
help to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change. The international climate treaty currently under negotiation is likely to include a
REDD mechanism that would provide funds to tropical countries to
save their forests, a move that would help to mitigate climate change
and sustain biodiversity.
Although ecosystem degradation looks set to increase in the future
as a result of climate change, the biggest threat to biodiversity today is
the rapid disappearance of habitats. At present, only around 14% of
land surface and less than 6% of territorial seas are protected worldwide. Yet such areas help to support nearly one-sixth of the world’s
population, according to the TEEB study. As nations look beyond
the likely failure of the 2010 biodiversity target, they should commit
to placing more areas under protection. It will be crucial to select
valuable sites that harbour the species that are most threatened. The
wealthiest sectors of society tend to be the most removed from nature,
whereas the world’s poorest people rely heavily on the fruits of diverse
ecosystems. As a result, care must be taken to ensure that conservation initiatives do not come at the expense of people, particularly
indigenous communities that can be indirectly harmed when land
is suddenly set aside.
■
Access denied?
EURExpress, both of which were launched with funds from the European Commission that have run out in recent months. The databases
are currently being maintained on a hand-to-mouth basis, and the
scientists who built them don’t know where to turn for maintenance
money. Yet the European Commission’s investment will have been
wasted if the databases disappear.
It is time for a whole new approach. Front-line biology cannot
function without these resources, so solutions must be found at both
national and international levels.
Governments must ensure that at least one of their national funding agencies has money specifically set aside for the long-term support of bioresource infrastructures.
A good model to emulate would be the “The sharing of
United Kingdom’s Biotechnology and bioresources does not
Biological Sciences Research Coun- and should not stop at
cil, which allows databases and other national borders.”
such resources to apply for ring-fenced
funding, saving them from having to compete with hypothesis-driven
grants, which are the agencies’ mainstay.
But action is also needed on the international front. The sharing
of bioresources does not and should not stop at national borders.
For example, only about a quarter of TAIR users are based in the
United States. China is the second biggest user at around 12%, followed by Japan at around 10%. This is not atypical. Yet it is difficult
for a single national agency to justify maintaining a resource for the
rest of the world. What is required is an international cost-sharing
organization that could fund competitively selected infrastructures,
large and small.
The European Commission has made a good start with projects
such as ELIXIR (European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological
Information), which is studying ways of steering national agencies
towards the joint funding of bioresources. A global, ELIXIR-like initiative is urgently needed, run perhaps by an international, relatively
unbureaucratic organization such as the Human Frontier Science
Program.
But an international solution may be a long time coming. In the
meantime, bioresource infrastructures might be wise to invest some
time in public relations, giving paymasters a greater understanding
of the consequences of their decisions.
■
Information-sharing resources are essential to
biologists and deserve international support.
very weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access
the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains
the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available
on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But
now, to those users’ horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National
Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as
the data resource’s sole supporter (see page 258).
TAIR’s plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the
world’s biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing
conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely.
Such agencies tend to support these resources during the development phase, but then expect them to find sustainable funding elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that is not easy. Other funding agencies are no more
likely to provide long-term support than the agency that launched the
resource in the first place. Moreover, any government agency’s longterm plans are vulnerable to short-term political expediency. Witness,
for example, Japan, where the new government has slashed the budget
of the RIKEN BioResource Centre by one-third (see page 258).
Private firms are equally poor bets. Advertising and sponsorship
are unlikely to bring in enough money to pay the experts needed
to maintain such resources. And the superficially plausible idea of
charging subscription fees is effectively unworkable for facilities such
as TAIR, because the producers and consumers of data are essentially
the same community. Scientists provide data and resources for free,
because sharing benefits everyone. However, they would be considerably less likely to deposit the fruits of their labour if this synergy
was removed from the equation. Subscription-based databases and
resources would then enter a downward spiral, becoming less and
less complete and so less and less valuable.
The problem is acute even for modest resources. Two examples
are the kidney database EuReGene and the mouse-embryo database
E
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© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved